Amid A Space Between: Irish Artists in America

March 8-April 19, 2012

Opening Reception - Saturday, March 10, 1-3 p.m.
Storytelling Evening - Thursday, March 22, 5.30-7.30 p.m.

Helen O'Leary: Construct - Destruct

Helen O’Leary, a County Wexford native, recently completed a Guggenheim fellowship in Paris. Her desire is to make unconventional paintings that “stand up without the usual structures of support.” For her, making art involves, “looking at my own life, the history of Sean-nós (in the old way) singing, (Samuel) Beckett's pared-down language, and the currency of need found in most houses when I was growing up.”

Born into an agrarian working class family, Helen O’Leary has successfully incorporated the simple humility of common Irish life into her work. By weaving together language, music, and art O’Leary deconstructs the conventions of provincialism into an informal and personalized statement of her heritage.

O’Leary’s combine-like structures subvert the conventions of form and stability inherent in the narratives of history. Influenced by colloquial Sean-nós, a form of spoken word lyrically composed into ornamental verse recounting love and loss, O’Leary’s pieces whimsically communicate similar odes to her past collections. By deconstructing her previous works and then reassembling them into assemblages of panels, canvas, and wood O’Leary is able to recount her story using new forms. In essence, although the new form has lingering remnants of past stories it is altogether reborn.

Richard Mosse: A Lighter Shade of Photography

Limerick-born Richard Mosse, is a graduate of Yale and Goldsmiths College, London. His Infra series was featured at Dublin Contemporary 2011. The series comprises large-scale photos created using film that sees an invisible spectrum of light. Mosse uses this film, which renders greens in a range of vivid pinks, to photograph rebels – some of them mere children – fighting in the Congo. He describes his project as an attempt to make visible what can’t be seen – for example, how the lush equatorial jungle quickly “swallows up” traces of the violence.


Colonel Soleil's Boys, North Kivu, Eastern Congo, 2010


Photography, a not very well celebrated medium in Ireland, allows Richard Mosse to interrogate the delicate boundary between objective realism and phantasmal aestheticism in current events. Mosse’s most recent work Infra tarries alongside adolescent rebel militias through the war ravaged countryside of the Congo. Mosse remarks; “I arrived in the Congo I had crossed a threshold into fiction, into my own symbolic order” (Mosse, Aperture Magazine).

By negotiating a path through these politically charged landscapes, Mosse stares directly in the face of conflict leaving both sides of the story excavated. 

Written by Edgar B. Ramirez.
- Edgar B. Ramirez is a graduate student of Philosophy at San Francisco State University interested in topics centered on aesthetics, visual theory, and contemporary ethics. He is currently seeking to integrate his analytic background with the subjective field of art criticism and sensory perception.